this is your rig on sugarcubes

exciting developments

Been too busy at work to thing about anything other than fur and rendering, buy a lot’s happened in the past few days in 3D and with school.

For starters, the story for my short film has totally changed. ^_^ It’s become a merger between the story of the grandmother and the cockroach, and the original Ramswoole maide story. I’ll post more about it when I have a finished leica reel, which should be some time next week.

I was finally able to get the Wipix no-flip leg working in Blender and that makes me happy. I still need to finish the rig and get Briar weighted, but I’m feeling a lot better about my decision to go with Blender for this short. Every time I have time to sit down and work in it, things just flow along.

As far as 3D news goes, Modo 4’s first set of preview vids are up at Luxology. Normally I watch Modo with only a passing interest, but there’s one video where a few thousand instances of a Rhino are spun around in the preview renderer, with full radiosity / GI going and volumetric lighting. It’s not unlike the speed of FPrime, although the instancing is something the old LW couldn’t do without third-party plugins (and I don’t think FPrime worked with them).

But that brings me to the second big CG thing of the week: Lightwave Core was announced and Newtek is already accepting pre-orders. There was a serious snafu with how the reveal went, but what was shown has me pretty excited– essentially an underlying architecture not unlike that of Houdini / Maya, but with Lightwave workflows and a fully-open C++ / Python SDK. It’s also using the Collads format as its regular scene format, which means it’s already a step ahead of all other packages with regards to interoperability. They said they’ve made a few extensions to the format, so just how compatible the LW Core files will be with other Collada-reading apps remains to be seen, but it’s a step in the right direction (IE: away from the horribly flawed and closed-source FBX).

There were a lot of buzzwords bandied around, and you can see the full tech FAQ on the new Core site. If you preorder (they call it purhasing a HardCore membership; man was that a bad name choice) you get access to the betas, with an apparent release date of the first build sometime in Q1. I’m remaining cautiously optimistic. If they deliver, they’ll be in a good place to pick up disgruntled users of Maya and XSI.

Okay, I’m actually hitting “post” this time; I have about three drafts on my iPhone that are now irrelevant. ^_^